Don’t Tread on Me
The United States and International Organizations
Boris Johnson, the mop-haired former mayor of London, was incredulous. It was mid-April 2016. President Barack Obama had just inserted himself into the most momentous political decision to confront the United Kingdom in decades: whether to leave the European Union. Johnson, a leader of the “Leave” campaign, found it “absolutely bizarre” to be “lectured by the Americans about giving up our sovereignty,” and he scoffed at Obama’s plan to deliver his plea in person just two months before Britain held its pivotal referendum. “I don’t know what he’s going to say,” Johnson told the BBC, “but if that is the American argument then it is nakedly hypocritical.” After all, “the Americans won’t even sign up to the international convention on the law of the seas, let alone the International Criminal Court.”1
One week later Obama stood beside U.K. prime minister David Cameron, himself a champion of the “Remain” camp. The president made it clear where he stood. Leaving the bloc would carry enormous risks, he warned, and also place Britain “at the back of the queue” in negotiations to enter the planned Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). “A strong Europe is not a threat to Britain’s global leadership; it enhances Britain’s global leadership,” the president elaborated in the Telegraph the next day. “In today’s world, even as we all cherish our sovereignty, the nations who wield their influence most effectively are the nations that do it through the collective action that today’s challenges demand.”2
Many others made similar pleas, including officials from the Bank of England, the City of London, the International Monetary Fund, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, as well as leading academics. In the end, none of it mattered. On June 23, 2016, British voters handed the Leave campaign a shocking if narrow victory, choosing by 52 percent to 48 percent to depart the EU. Johnson heralded it as Britain’s “Independence Day.”3
The result threw the EU into turmoil. The bloc had long suffered from deficits of both democracy and affection, of course. “Brussels”—where most EU institutions are located—had become shorthand for officious, unaccountable Eurocrats meddling in everything from national fisheries policies to the proper shape of bananas.4 For too many of its 500 million citizens, the EU seemed distant, opaque, and unresponsive. Now it faced a real possibility of unraveling were other members to join the United Kingdom in the departure lounge.
In the past European leaders had seized on crises to deepen integration, depicting “more Europe” as the only solution. That dynamic seemed to have run its course. From its origins as a tight bloc of six members, the EU had grown into an unwieldy, continent-spanning behemoth encompassing twenty-eight heterogeneous nations. Stuck in an unmanagable halfway house between a confederation of sovereign states and a federal political union, the EU seemed less likely to achieve the “ever-closer union” envisioned in its Lisbon Treaty (2009) than a looser, multi-speed arrangement that allowed members greater flexibility to opt into (or out of) particular provisions and initiatives.5
The Brexit vote reverberated across the Atlantic. Donald Trump, by then the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, lauded Britons for their “brave and brilliant” decision to “take back their independence.” He promised to help Americans do the same. “Come November, the American people will have the chance to re-declare their independence.… They will have the chance to reject today’s rule by the global elite and to embrace real change that delivers a government of, by and for the people.”6
BREXIT’S RELEVANCE FOR U.S. SOVEREIGNTY DEBATES
The U.S. media depicted Brexit as part of a populist storm surge inundating Western democracies, one propelled by the economic anxiety and political alienation felt by globalization’s “losers.” What united Johnson and Trump, in this narrative, was their ability to tap into voter discontent and class resentment.7
This was at best a partial explanation, and it is worthwhile exploring the other major impetus for Brexit, since it bears on contemporary U.S. sovereignty debates. It turns out that the “Leave” camp was animated not merely by antiglobalization sentiments but also by prosovereignty convictions. Many Britons were angry that critical matters like immigration had been handed to supranational institutions beyond the control of their Parliament.
Proponents of “Remain” protested that these concerns were overblown. Shortly before the referendum, Robin Niblett, director of the London think tank Chatham House, dismissed what he termed “the sovereignty myth.” The United Kingdom had transferred only limited powers to the European Commission (EC), he insisted. These included the authority to negotiate trade agreements, to set common standards and regulations for products and services, to develop rules for the common market, and to liberalize intra-EU migration and employment. Moreover, any EU policies still had to be approved by the European Council, an intergovernmental body composed of officials from member states, as well as the European Parliament, to which the citizens of each EU country elected national representatives. The bottom line, Niblett argued, was the United Kingdom was “still largely sovereign.”8
Other advocates of “Remain” depicted the United Kingdom’s effort to take back control as illusory. Even outside of the EU, The Economist opined, the United Kingdom would remain “at the mercy of [the same] economic forces and the members of the Union it had spurned.”9 To regain access to EU markets, it would still need to accept almost all of the EU’s regulations. Only now it would have no influence in drafting and approving them.
Such subtleties were lost in the Brexit debate, which focused on those powers that Britain had ceded to Brussels. Brexit advocates were convinced “that the EU is run by unaccountable bureaucrats who trample on Britain’s sovereignty as they plot a superstate,” The Economist reported. “Quitting the sclerotic, undemocratic EU, the Brexiteers say, would set Britain free to reclaim its sovereign destiny as an outward-looking power.”10 Writing in the New York Times on June 14, 2016, Douglas Carswell of the U.K. Independence Party framed Britain’s choice in a way Americans might understand. “The European Commission … is the only European Union body that can propose laws, and it is unelected—an arrangement George III might have admired,” he noted. “We’re voting for reclaiming the principle of democratic self-determination on which the United States was founded.” Given America’s own history, Boris Johnson added, it was “a piece of outrageous and exorbitant hypocrisy” for the Obama administration to sing the EU’s praises. “They sometimes seem to forget that we are quite fond of liberty, too.”11
Brexit’s champions may have been shortsighted and undiplomatic. But their critique of U.S. hypocrisy hit the mark: Americans who counseled the United Kingdom to remain in the EU were indeed asking Brits to accept infringements on their sovereignty-as-authority that few U.S. citizens would countenance. And this was nothing new: Since the Marshall Plan, both Republican and Democratic administrations had championed European integration. They did so even as U.S. elected officials and American citizens rejected any supranational authority over themselves as a threat to U.S. popular sovereignty, as embodied in the Constitution.
To appreciate just how different the post-1945 American and European experiences with sovereignty have been, consider the following passage from a landmark 1964 ruling by the European Court of Justice, in Costa v. ENEL. That decision, reached less than two decades after World War II, spelled out the degree to which the members of the (then) European Community had already transferred sovereignty to continental institutions, in ways unimaginable to Americans:
By creating a Community of unlimited duration, having its own institutions, its own personality, its own legal capacity and capacity of representation on the international plane and, more particularly, real powers stemming from a limitation of sovereignty or a transfer of powers from the States to the Community, the Member States have limited their sovereign rights, albeit within limited fields, and have thus created a body of law which binds both their nationals and themselves.… The transfer by the States from their domestic legal system to the Community legal system of their rights and obligations arising under the Treaty carries with it a permanent limitation of their sovereign rights, against which a subsequent unilateral act incompatible with the concept of the Community cannot prevail.12
In the more than five decades following the Costa v. ENEL ruling, a growing number of European nations had delegated tangible state authorities to supranational institutions in Brussels, as well as accepted pooled decisionmaking within intergovernmental EU bodies.
The one area where European states had clawed back power was insisting on the right to withdraw from the EU (a right that Costa v. ENEL had not recognized). The Lisbon Treaty of 2009—while declaring EU members’ intent to pursue “ever closer union”—explicitly acknowledged this prerogative in its Article 50: “Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.” In October 2016, Theresa May, the United Kingdom’s first post-Brexit prime minister, announced that the government would soon begin formal negotiations to do just that. “We are leaving [the EU] to become, once more, a fully sovereign and independent country,” she explained.13 On March 29, 2017, May triggered Article 50, starting the two-year timetable for the United Kingdom’s divorce from the EU.
THE UNITED STATES AND THE UNITED NATIONS
The purpose in recounting the Brexit decision is to underscore how different the U.S. experience with international organizations has been from membership in the EU, particularly when it comes to ceding sovereignty. In contrast with Europe’s post-1945 experience, the United States has resisted submitting to the political authority of any supranational body. Nearly two and a half centuries after the nation’s founding, this stance remains a bedrock of U.S. constitutionalism and a neuralgic foreign policy reflex, limiting America’s willingness to delegate powers to and pool decisionmaking within international institutions.
Of the many purported threats to American sovereignty, no international organization generates as much political controversy as the United Nations. Thanks to its universal membership, broad mandate, and binding Charter, the UN lies at the heart of the contemporary multilateral system. This very centrality has made the world body from its earliest days a lightning rod for American sovereigntists. In 1952 Representative John Travers Wood (R-Idaho) worried that the new United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) would teach American children to revere not “our country and its beautiful Star-Spangled Banner,” but instead “a world government and the spider web banner of the United Nations.” Two decades later, Representative John R. Rarick (D-La.) proposed legislation “to remove the United States from the UN and the UN from the United States, thus freeing our people from the ever-tightening yoke of international controls and the erosion of national sovereignty and constitutional government.”14
One might have expected such sovereigntist vigilance to wane after the Cold War’s end, which left the United States as the world’s unchallenged superpower. Not so. Sovereigntist anxieties waxed. This emerged most starkly in armed “militia” movements on the right-wing fringe of American politics. But a number of conservative intellectuals beat a similar drum, insisting that the United States rein in international organizations. “It is extremely important that Americans and/or the US government not come to think or speak as if it regarded the UN as the ultimate source of legitimacy,” Jeanne Kirkpatrick, former U.S. envoy to the United Nations, testified before Congress in 1996. “Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution identify very different sources of legitimacy. The Declaration of Independence says clearly: ‘To protect these rights governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers (that is, their legitimacy) from the consent of the governed.’ ”15
This determination to protect U.S. sovereignty has occasionally elicited head-scratching behavior from U.S. political leaders. Consider the American Land Sovereignty Protection Act, which Representative Don Young (R-Alaska) introduced in the House in 1997. That legislation would have mandated congressional approval before UNESCO could designate any portion of U.S. territory as a Biosphere Reserve or World Heritage Site. In the previous quarter century such designations had been commonplace and uncontroversial—in part because UNESCO could only consider locations that a U.S. president had explicitly nominated. That safeguard was apparently no longer enough for Young, who introduced his bill to underscore “our congressional duty to keep international commitments from abridging traditional constitutional constraints.” As he reminded his colleagues, “We are not a one-world group. We are the sovereign Nation of the United States of America.”16
In response, President Clinton threatened to veto the bill, arguing that it “would unduly restrict” the executive’s ability to nominate such lands. The White House also disputed the congressman’s implication “that international conservation agreements and programs infringe upon the national sovereignty of the United States.” In the end, Young’s legislation failed to advance, as did a Senate version introduced in 2002 by Senator Bob Smith (R-N.H.).17
Senator Helms Goes to New York
When it comes to defending U.S. sovereignty in Congress, few individuals took to the task with as much relish as Jesse Helms, a five-term (1973–2003) Republican senator from North Carolina and bête noire of U.S. liberal internationalists. The main target of Helms’s animus—at least after the demise of the Soviet Union—was the United Nations, which he regarded as corrupt, inefficient, and irretrievably anti-American. In the 1990s, Helms led a campaign to impose reform on and reduce U.S. financial obligations to the world body. This included demanding that the UN agree to zero nominal budget growth and meet specific reform “benchmarks.”
Under Helms’s leadership, Congress also began withholding payments of U.S. contributions to the UN’s regular and peacekeeping budgets as a way to increase U.S. leverage over UN reform. Beyond poisoning the diplomatic atmosphere in New York, the steady accumulation of U.S. arrears precipitated a UN financial crisis. This controversy was finally resolved in 1999 thanks to Richard Holbrooke, U.S. envoy to the UN, an indefatigable diplomat who cajoled and browbeat other member states until they agreed to reduce America’s annual dues.
With that crisis resolved, Holbrooke hoped to put U.S.-UN relations on a more secure footing. To that end he arranged in January 2000 for Helms, then chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to be granted an unprecedented audience before the fifteen-nation UN Security Council, as well as ambassadors from another 100-odd member states. The courtly but cagey senator used the occasion to fire a shot across the UN’s bow.18 Helms opened by apologizing for his “Southern” drawl and “blunt” language. “I am not a diplomat and thus not fully conversant in the elegant and rarified language of the diplomatic trade,” he explained. “I am an elected official, with something of a reputation for saying what I mean and meaning what I say.”
What he had to say was plenty. The American people were willing to work with a UN that knew its place and stuck to its knitting by focusing on “core tasks” like delivering humanitarian aid, conducting peacekeeping missions, carrying out weapons inspections, and helping member states form “coalitions of the willing.” What they would not tolerate was a United Nations that aspired “to establish itself as the central authority of a new international order of global laws and global governance,” he declared. “This is an international order the American people will not countenance.”
The U.N. must respect national sovereignty. The U.N. serves nation-states, not the other way around. This principle is central to the legitimacy and ultimate survival of the United Nations, and it is a principle that must be respected.…
The American people do not want the United Nations to become an “entangling alliance.” That is why Americans look with alarm at U.N. claims to a monopoly on international moral legitimacy. They see this as a threat to the God-given freedoms of the American people, a claim of political authority over America and its elected leaders without their consent.… There is only one source of legitimacy of the American government’s policies—and that is the consent of the American people.
If the United Nations is to survive into the 21st century, it must recognize its limitations. The demands of the United States have not changed much since Henry Cabot Lodge laid out his conditions for joining the League of Nations 80 years ago: Americans want to ensure that the United States of America remains the sole judge of its own internal affairs, that the United Nations is not allowed to restrict the individual rights of U.S. citizens, and that the United States retains sole authority over the deployment of United States forces around the world.
Helms closed with what he had promised—a blunt warning: “If the United Nations respects the sovereign rights of the American people, and serves them as an effective tool of diplomacy, it will earn and deserve their respect and support,” he declared. “But a United Nations that seeks to impose its presumed authority on the American people without their consent begs for confrontation and, I want to be candid with you, eventual withdrawal.”19
Helms’s broadside annoyed even U.S. allies. France’s UN ambassador, Alain Dejammet, rejected the implication that the U.S. Congress could dictate the UN’s future. “We hear you, but the idea in this house is that others must be heard as well,” he sniffed. “The United Nations is not a separate organ to which we turn, like a fire service,” Britain’s Sir Jeremy Greenstock reminded the senator. “It is the member states, and the United States owns 25 percent of the power and the resources of the United Nations. What it does well, the U.S. gets credit for. What it does badly, the U.S. must bear some responsibility for.” Frustration with collective decisionmaking was simply part of life at the UN, Greenstock continued. “We have to do things here democratically because we all have national sovereignties,” he said, repeating, “We all have national sovereignties.” The very purpose of the UN was to try to reconcile these independent perspectives for the common good. And, “in a globalizing world, there is such a thing as the international collective interest.”20
Helms’s extraordinary audience may have improved mutual understanding—if not affection—between Capitol Hill and Turtle Bay (the Manhattan location of UN headquarters). But it also exposed how the separation of powers complicates coherence in U.S. foreign policy. Just four days after Helms had addressed the Council, it was Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s turn. “Only the President and the Executive Branch can speak for the United States,” she underscored. “Today, on behalf of the President, let me say that the Administration, and I believe most Americans, see our role in the world, and our relationship to this organization, quite differently than does Senator Helms.”21
The crafty North Carolinian has long departed this world. But legions of “new sovereigntists” have picked up his standard to warn the nation that the expanding number, complexity, and scope of international organizations threatens U.S. freedom of action and constitutional liberties, portending the rise of an oppressive world government.22 “I have said for years that we ought to get the U.S. out of the U.N. and the U.N. out of the U.S.,” Representative Paul Broun (R-Ga.) declared in 2009, at the launch of the Congressional Sovereignty Caucus. “I’ll do everything I can in the Congress to maintain the U.S. as a sovereign nation, subservient to no one but the almighty God.”23 The Sovereignty Caucus is “not a paranoiacs association,” Danielle Pletka of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute insisted. “Its members see real risks in ceding more and more constitutional prerogatives to supranational institutions that have no accountability to the American voter, signing up to treaties that have no prospect of entry into force.”24
For critics of the United Nations and other international organizations, the risks are clear. Gradually but inexorably, such bodies are expanding their activities, with little or no oversight by their sovereign state creators. They “have slipped their restraints and now run amok,” like “institutional Frankensteins terrorizing the global countryside.”25
Coming to Terms with the United Nations
The UN is front and center in this critique. “The fact that the U.S. continues to contribute billions of taxpayer dollars every year to an unaccountable, unreformed UN is no laughing matter,” Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) told The Hill in early 2011. She pledged to use her position as the incoming chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to rein in the world body. Such concerns were not simply about reported waste, incompetence, and inefficiency. They were also about the alleged threat that the United Nations poses to American sovereignty. Reflecting such concerns, the Republican Party chose as the title of the UN plank in its June 2016 platform “Sovereign American Leadership in International Organizations.”26
To other UN member states, the very idea that the United Nations poses a serious threat to American sovereignty is risible. After all, the United States is by far the UN’s most influential actor, and the world body depends on U.S. political and material support for its relevance and, arguably, its very existence. Contrary to what many Americans believe, moreover, the size of the UN is modest. For 2016–17 its annual regular budget was only $5.4 billion—slightly more than that of the New York City Police Department ($4.9 billion) and less than double the 2015 lobbying expenditures ($3.6 billion) of the National Rifle Association—and the United States paid only 22 percent of that total.27 This figure does not include expenditures for UN peacekeeping, the U.S. share of which amounted to roughly $2.5 billion in 2016, or voluntary U.S. contributions to multiple UN agencies (particularly for humanitarian purposes), which totaled approximately $5 billion in that same year.28 Adding up all these sums, U.S. spending on the UN and its activities in fiscal year 2016 was slightly less than $8 billion—or about 0.2 percent of the federal budget (much of it channeled through budgets of U.S. agencies).
Despite its relatively modest scale, the UN has indeed expanded on multiple fronts since 1945, from the size of its membership to the number of its agencies to the scope of its activities. All this expansion—approved by member states—can feed misperceptions of a UN global power grab. The UN Charter established only a handful of UN central organs. These included the office of the UN secretary general, conceived as its chief administrative officer; the Security Council, responsible for maintenance of international peace and security; the General Assembly, composed of all member states; the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), designed to advance development; the International Court of Justice; and the Trusteeship Council, intended to assist decolonization. Over more than seven decades the UN has grown both upward and outward. António Gutteres, the former Portuguese prime minister elected the ninth secretary general in 2016, presides over a Secretariat that now includes twenty separate departments and offices. The Security Council has also established multiple subsidiary bodies, among these the Counterterrorism Committee, the Peacebuilding Commission, and committees to monitor specific countries under sanction. Peacekeeping—something that the Charter did not even envision—has become one of the organization’s core activities.
Meanwhile, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and ECOSOC have used their authority to establish more than seventy specialized agencies, bodies, commissions, funds, and programs, from the Economic Commission for Latin America to the Human Rights Council, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the UN Environmental Program. Farther afield, the UN family encompasses other bodies, such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to monitor the implementation of international commitments (in these cases, the NPT and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC]). Figure 8-1 shows how UN multilateral bodies have proliferated since the 1940s.
FIGURE 8-1. Increase in UN Multilateral Bodies by Decade
The overall result—euphemistically known as the “United Nations System”—is a tangle of multilateral organs reporting to diverse authorities and dependent on diverse funding streams (figure 8-2). This institutional labyrinth provides a target-rich environment for critics to blast the UN as opaque, unaccountable, inefficient, and (frequently) un-American. Such critiques are sometimes on the mark, particularly as they relate to management within the UN Secretariat, deliberations within UNGA and ECOSOC, and the performance of many subsidiary bodies. Across the UN system, overlapping authorities and mandates create redundancy and hinder coherent policies. Despite repeated reform efforts, the UN’s organs and overseas operations still lack sufficient transparency, monitoring, and accountability.
Much of this dysfunction is of course the fault of member states, whose diverse preferences and incompatible interests often undercut UN performance and produce negative outcomes.29 To begin with, member states can sidetrack agencies by pursuing narrowly self-interested motives, or indeed seek to sabotage their functioning. A case in point is the Human Rights Council, to which human rights abusers often seek election precisely to undercut its purposes. The suspicion that foxes too often guard the proverbial UN henhouse is a constant complaint of sovereigntists.
FIGURE 8-2. The United Nations System
The pursuit of narrow self-interest by member states is hardly confined to the United Nations, of course, but extends to other international organizations. The World Bank, for instance, is charged with alleviating poverty. But its lending decisions are ultimately determined by an executive board dominated by powerful member states that may be preoccupied with short-term geopolitical or commercial goals. (In the years after September 11, for instance, the United States itself worked on the World Bank board to channel huge resources to Pakistan and other “front-line states” in the global struggle against terrorism, often at the expense of traditional development objectives and standards.)
Second, member states often use international organizations to engage in political theater. This is most problematic in larger bodies like the 193-nation General Assembly or the 54-nation ECOSOC, where the United States frequently finds itself on the defensive, as developing country and authoritarian governments seek to score ideological points against the West, or to block scrutiny of their own human rights records. (Such dynamics led Daniel Patrick Moynihan to title the memoir of his 1970s tenure as America’s UN envoy A Dangerous Place.) The fact that many UN member states are ruled by dictators understandably discourages U.S. officials from granting them the same moral standing as democracies, despite the UN principle of sovereign equality.30
Third, member states themselves are often to blame for institutional mission creep, particularly when they expand an organization’s mandate without providing adequate financial, personnel, or other resources. Since 1990, for example, the UN Security Council (with full U.S. support) has repeatedly added new mission elements to UN peace operations, in often dangerous environments, without equipping the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations to handle these new requirements, and thus setting it up for failure.31 Likewise, after 2000 the World Health Assembly saddled WHO headquarters in Geneva with new responsibilities, while cutting its overall budget and continuing to grant nearly complete autonomy to the WHO’s several regional offices. These budgetary woes and institutional design flaws contributed to the WHO’s flailing response to the 2014 ebola crisis in West Africa.32
Finally, many governments treat the UN’s Secretariat, programs, and agencies essentially as a spoils system to provide sinecures for well-connected, though not necessarily competent or honest, citizens.
But the pathologies of the UN and other large global bodies are not simply a function of interstate maneuvering to advance national power, interests, or values. Such organizations are more than intergovernmental settings; they are also actors in their own right that enjoy legitimacy, and a degree of freedom of action, thanks to their international legal status and their possession of specialized technical expertise and information. They can use these attributes to become “autonomous sites of authority,” capable of influencing the global agenda, championing new norms and standards, and shaping international rules. These roles can be beneficial. But they can also produce dysfunction. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, they sometimes behave in ways that diverge from the interests of their creators and ostensible masters.33
Two inherent features of international organizations allow them to dilute the sovereign authority of their member states—including the United States. First, these bodies typically require members to delegate some authority to an independent secretariat, which may then take actions contrary to any given state’s preferences. Second, member states must pool some measure of sovereignty within the boards or councils they create to govern international organizations. Together, “delegation” and “pooling” make it harder for U.S. officials to hold international organizations accountable to U.S. citizens, in whom American sovereignty ultimately resides. Over time, such incremental incursions can chip away at U.S. democratic sovereignty as well as produce outcomes contrary to U.S. interests.
THE DILEMMAS OF DELEGATION
All contractual relationships—such as between an investor and her broker, a client and his lawyer, or a town and its snow removal service—involve “a conditional grant of authority from a principal to an agent that empowers the latter to act on behalf of the former.”34 This grant of authority is known as delegation. It occurs in domestic political relationships, as when Congress, on behalf of the American people, authorizes the Food and Drug Administration to determine the safety and efficacy of antidepressant medications, or when the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contracts with the U.S.-based NGO World Vision to implement a rural education project in Tanzania.
Inherent in delegation is uncertainty about whether the agent can be trusted. Will the agent uphold its end of the bargain? Or will it pursue its own interests rather than those of its principal? Deviant behavior (known as agency slack) can take two forms. One is shirking, in which the agent fails to deliver on commitments to its principal. The other is slippage, in which the agent takes actions divergent from the principal’s preferences. Both are costly, giving the principal an incentive to monitor and control its agents. Agents, meanwhile, try to conceal deviant behavior by hiding their actions and relevant information.35
Even in a domestic context, it can be hard to hold agents accountable. The White House and cabinet secretaries try to provide clear direction to federal agencies, for example, and congressional paymasters seek to exercise legislative oversight, but civil servants may pursue their own agendas, obstruct reform efforts, and defend turf. Elected leaders come and go. Meanwhile, “bureaucracy does its thing.”36
FIGURE 8-3. The Delegation Chain for an International Organization (IO)
This so-called principal-agent problem is even tougher at the global level, where the United States and other national governments try to hold international organizations accountable. Chains of delegation tend to be longer, making it harder to monitor the relevant agent.37 Under the U.S. constitutional system, the American people delegate to their elected federal officials various authorities, including the authority to ratify treaties establishing international organizations, as well as to nominate and confirm U.S. ambassadors to represent them on any intergovernmental board or council charged with supervising that organization’s secretariat.
As figure 8-3 shows, the chain of accountability for international organizations includes at least three separate principal-agent relationships, complicated by the division of labor between the executive branch and Congress. And the number of links increases as global organizations create subsidiary bodies.
The danger inherent in this scenario is that the secretariat of an international organization may behave in ways that diverge widely from the preferences of the American people, who are likely to be “rationally ignorant of most of its activities” or, if dissatisfied with its performance, “lack the power to impose their will” on that body.38 Typically, U.S. citizens pay more attention to (and better understand) public policy debates on topics closer to their daily lives—like how their mayor is doing or where school district boundaries should be drawn. They have fewer obvious opportunities or incentives to familiarize themselves with multilateral deliberations, particularly when these involve technical topics and occur behind closed doors.
As trustees of the people’s sovereignty, the U.S. executive and legislative branches (and at times the Supreme Court) have a fiduciary responsibility to hold UN agencies and other international organizations to account. But a host of practical, political, and structural hurdles can get in the way. These include heavy demands on officials’ time, toxic partisan divisions, competing national priorities, and the bluntness of tools available to discipline or impose reform on wayward, freelancing, or spendthrift international organizations.
Intuitively, Americans understand that distance complicates accountability. That is why Americans, even if multilaterally inclined, often regard “international institutions … as runaway trains whose conductors have lost contact with the station and drive on [to] a destination of their own choosing without regard for their passengers or freight.”39
When the secretariats of multilateral bodies are well insulated from external influence, they have more leeway to shirk responsibilities, strike out on their own, or go down paths (or rabbit holes) against the wishes of member states. They can commit a host of bureaucratic sins. These include “kicking the can” down the road, ignoring “wrongheaded” guidance from governing boards, sugar-coating annual reports, “stonewalling” rather than producing damaging information, and promoting their own pet causes or norms.40
At a grander level of deviance, the same secretariats may act beyond their legitimate power (or ultra vires, in lawyerly Latin). During the early 1990s, many critics in the United States chastised then-UN secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali for claiming to speak on behalf of the “world community” rather than acting as the diffident servant of UN member states. Global bodies can also divert their power from its true purpose (détournement de pouvoir, in French legalese), by taking actions unnecessary to advance outside the scope of their mandate.41
Suspicion that international institutions are serving their own (or others’) interests makes them a fat target for sovereignty-minded U.S. politicians and commentators. In 1995, during his ultimately unsuccessful campaign for the presidency, Senator Robert Dole (R-Kans.) took aim at what he viewed as President Bill Clinton’s imprudent faith in the United Nations, declaring, “U.S. sovereignty must be defended, not delegated.” Two decades later, the conservative commentator Andrew Quinlan took to the pages of the Washington Times to castigate the OECD—a standard-setting body uniting the world’s advanced market democracies—for “wandering beyond its initial mandate” to “pursue an agenda opposed to the interests of most Americans.”42
One of the biggest bugaboos of American sovereigntists is the fear that the UN and other international organizations will gain unwarranted independence by securing funding streams that are outside of state control. Prominent economists have contributed to these anxieties by proposing innovative revenue-generating schemes (such as modest charges on foreign exchange transactions) that would allow the UN and other parts of the “international community” to pay for “global public goods.”43 In their jeremiad, Here Come the Black Helicopters! UN Global Governance and the Loss of Freedom, the husband-and-wife team of pundits Dick Morris and Eileen McGann declare that UN taxes are just around the corner. Unlike normal UN dues approved by Congress, Morris and McGann warn, these will “be mandatory levies imposed by treaty on American citizens.”44 On this matter, at least, there is little to fear. Both Republican and Democratic parties remain loath to grant the UN and its agencies any independent source of revenue.
Problems with Pooling
The second potential threat to U.S. sovereign authority arises from the need for member states to establish organs of collective decisionmaking to govern international organizations. Such pooling of sovereignty requires national governments to reconcile their diverse preferences, and it inevitably dilutes each nation’s influence over multilateral organizations.45
Things are a lot simpler when the U.S. government delegates a task to a U.S. agency. In this domestic scenario, the president and Congress are responsible for aggregating and deciding among the diverse preferences of U.S. citizens, translating these into policy, and contracting with U.S. agencies to implement relevant programs. But international organizations require a second process of aggregating preferences, at the global level. The U.S. government and its foreign counterparts must reconcile their own nationally generated preferences, hammer out what powers to delegate to the new organization, and agree on decisionmaking rules for its governing board.
Such collective decisionmaking inevitably attenuates the ability of any one country—including the United States—to influence (much less determine) the organization’s behavior.46 Indeed, this is the very purpose of multilateral cooperation: to force states to reciprocally adjust their domestic preferences so that they all gain, even if they do not gain everything that they want. It is the only way to manage globalization in a world of pluralism. The dilemma inherent in pooling is navigating the trade-offs between the benefits of international cooperation and the natural desire to control the organization. Where possible, the United States prefers decisionmaking systems based on weighted voting, as in the executive boards of the World Bank and the IMF, or that provide it with an effective veto, as in the UN Security Council. But many multilateral organizations lack these attributes.47
This predicament sharpens as membership grows. More encompassing bodies imply more states, and each additional player can undercut the organization’s performance or redirect its activities. Most problematic are multilateral bodies like the UN General Assembly or the UN Committee on Disarmament, which are anchored in the ideal of sovereign equality and make decisions on a one-state-one-vote basis. As blockages rise, members may be tempted to delegate more authority to the organization’s secretariat. But that too carries risks, since a secretariat with many masters can play its principals against one another—bobbing and weaving among competing preferences to advance its own institutional interests, which may deviate from its ostensible mandate.
Large memberships also make it harder to sanction secretariats that underperform, particularly when some member states support shirking or slippage. The United States often finds itself in “damage-control” mode, working to prevent ideological constituencies like the Non-Aligned Movement or the Group of 77 (G-77) coalition of developing countries, encrusted regional groupings, and coalitions of bad actors from (in the U.S. view) hijacking the global agenda.48
These twin realities—elongated accountability chains and collective governance by multiple principals—help explain why multilateral bodies proliferate and persist. International organizations are indeed adept at reproducing: more than half of those that have emerged since 1945 are spin-offs from preexisting organizations. And in most cases it has been senior officials within existing bodies that provided the impetus for new ones.49
Principal-agent dynamics also enable international organizations, unlike milk, to survive well beyond their “sell-by” dates. As Vaubel observes, “It is easier to found [one] than to abolish it.”50 Institutions create vested interests among beneficiaries, contractors, and advocacy groups. They also evolve with the times, changing their mandates and activities both with and without member state guidance.
Consider the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Created in 1930 to facilitate the payment of German reparations required by the Treaty of Versailles, the BIS survives as a “bank for central banks,” helping set capital account requirements and encourage reserve transparency among its more than sixty members. Or take the OECD. First established in 1947 as a European-only organization (the Organization for European Economic Cooperation, OEEC) to coordinate Marshall Plan aid, it has since become a leading source of standard setting and data sharing for its advanced market democracy members. Likewise, the International Energy Agency (IEA), created in the mid-1970s in the wake of the Arab oil embargo to ensure that OECD members had sufficient oil stockpiles, has expanded its energy security mandate to promote “green” technologies and reach out to emerging economies like China and India. The apparent lesson is that “international institutions may change their names or lose their function but they never die.”51
Given these common pathologies, why would the United States agree to delegate authorities and pool decisionmaking within international organizations?52 After all, powerful states can often accomplish a lot unilaterally, and none is mightier than the United States. And even when cooperation is required, it can sometimes be accomplished through informal “coalitions of the willing” or via simple multilateral agreement to take specific policy steps, as in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.
In some circumstances, though, a formal organization just makes sense. First, some enduring challenges require the clear mandate, technical expertise, predictable resources, and staying power that only a standing institution possesses. Global development is a case in point. The field is crowded with donors, but the World Bank is unequaled as a repository of relevant knowledge and public financial resources. Second, standing international organizations help sovereign countries surmount collective action problems. They make it easier to agree on common standards, like how to divide the electromagnetic spectrum or assign orbital slots for satellites. They can also overcome free-rider dilemmas—for example, by ensuring that all countries meet their trade obligations. And they help nations make credible commitments, allowing other governments to monitor and verify follow-through on pledges to (say) destroy chemical weapons.
Third, standing organizations can offer a neutral setting to help nations solve disputes, including through arbitration, as with the WTO’s dispute settlement mechanism. Fourth, of particular value to the United States, international organizations can help “lock in” favorable institutional arrangements (such as weighted voting in the IMF or veto power in the Security Council) in the face of long-term uncertainties about the trajectory of the nation’s relative power.
Finally, international institutions can advance important U.S. interests in situations where the United States cannot or prefers not to do everything itself. By supporting UN agencies like the WHO, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the IAEA, and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the United States can leverage the resources of other member states to (respectively) respond to emerging infectious diseases, provide humanitarian relief, monitor compliance with nuclear disarmament, and improve the safety of civil aviation. In this regard, UN peacekeeping merits special mention. At the start of 2017 the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations managed sixteen missions involving 100,000 soldiers and 20,000 police and other civilians—making “blue helmets” the largest globally deployed military force in the world.53 These missions helped reduce violence and instability in nations such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan, countries where the United States has humanitarian interests but little appetite to assume all the costs and risks of trying to end violence.
The World Health Organization as a Case Study
The field of global health illustrates how deepening global interdependence can create incentives for national governments, including the United States, to sacrifice some sovereign autonomy—and even modest sovereign authority—for the benefits of international cooperation. This is most obvious in the powers granted to the WHO to combat dangerous infectious diseases. Over the past three decades the world has experienced a surge of new and reemerging infectious diseases, as economic development in previously remote regions increases human exposure to zoonotic pathogens and as revolutions in transportation and travel make formerly distant populations more epidemiologically interdependent. Faced with the specter of global pandemics, national authorities have granted the WHO unprecedented powers, notably through the revised International Health Regulations (IHR), which came into force in 2005.
The first iteration of the IHR, adopted in 1969, was limited out of respect for the sovereignty of WHO member states. They applied to only three diseases (cholera, plague, and yellow fever), and even then afflicted member states, worried about political and economic repercussions, failed to reliably notify the WHO of disease outbreaks. (Their fears were often justified, since other member states frequently imposed restrictions on travel to and trade with outbreak-affected countries.) In another bow to sovereignty, states forbade the WHO from using information about outbreaks provided by nongovernmental sources.54 These weaknesses were thrown into sharp relief in the 1980s and 1990s, as the WHO—and the world—struggled to cope with both a resurgence of known diseases (such as cholera in South America and plague in India) and the appearance of novel ones (including HIV/AIDS and ebola) that threated international public health. As globalization accelerated and the world became more microbially interconnected, it became obvious that the legal foundation of global public health was no longer fit for its purpose.
With strong U.S. support, the World Health Organization in 1995 adopted a resolution calling for the revision of the IHR. Negotiating the updated regulations took ten years, however, as sovereignty concerns slowed acceptance of two radical WHO proposals. One was that the new IHR adopt a broader, more flexible approach to infectious diseases, so that they could cover all “public health emergencies of international concern” (PHEICs). The second was that WHO be allowed to use nongovernmental information sources, since states could not always be trusted to self-report. Both proposals won growing support after the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which the Chinese government initially tried to cover up and, subsequently, to downplay. In the end, as David Fidler notes, China’s efforts to “play the sovereignty card” proved futile.55
It was in this context that the revised IHR were formulated and adopted in 2005. The new regulations struck a balance between sovereign prerogatives and obligations. They explicitly recognized that “States have … the sovereign right to legislate and to implement legislation in pursuit of their health policies” (Article 3.4). But they required national governments to report to the WHO on potential PHEICs in a timely manner and to refrain from imposing unnecessary trade and travel restrictions. They also permitted the WHO to use information from nongovernmental sources, to request verification about diseases from the relevant government, and to share this information with other WHO member states. Most dramatically, the revised IHR granted the WHO the right to name and shame countries that failed to comply with their reporting obligations (Article 10.4). Although the WHO was not given formal enforcement mechanisms, such as sanctions, its new authority to declare states noncompliant carried potential economic as well as reputational costs. Last, the revised IHR granted the WHO director-general unprecedented power to coordinate global epidemic response, including the authority to independently designate an epidemic as a PHEIC. As Fidler and Lawrence Gostin write, “In short, the information and verification provisions privilege global health governance over state sovereignty.”56
The major ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014–15 revived the debate on the IHR and, more generally, on the meaning of sovereignty in a world in which pathogens easily hop borders and continents. The crisis underscored the failure of many countries to implement their minimum core capacity requirements under the IHR and exposed the tendency of member states to impose excessive travel and trade restrictions against affected countries. It also revealed a WHO director-general, Margaret Chan, who was hesitant to declare a PHEIC in deference to the wishes of ebola-affected West African countries—thus undercutting the principle that state sovereignty must be balanced with the goal of global health. The Report of the Ebola Interim Assessment Panel—an independent review panel appointed by Chan herself—cited these failures in making the case for “shared sovereignty,” as follows:
Whereas health is considered the sovereign responsibility of countries, the means to fulfill this responsibility are increasingly global, and require international collective action and effective and efficient governance of the global health system.… This Panel suggests that in the interests of protecting global health, countries must have a notion of “shared sovereignty.” Through the International Health Regulations (2005), Member States recognized that there are limits to national sovereignty when health crises reach across borders.57
The report’s conclusions echoed the prescient words of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who had testified to Congress in 1965, “There are no such things as sovereignty with respect to epidemic diseases … because disease does not recognize political borders.”58
Whether the goal is managing cross-border financial flows, combating transnational terrorism, preventing catastrophic greenhouse gas emissions, or stemming the next pandemic, advancing the domestic public good more frequently requires some delegation of sovereignty to international organizations. As Robert Keohane, Stephen Macedo, and Andrew Moravcsik write, “The choice, therefore, is not between international cooperation and domestic autonomy, but between complementary activities of international and domestic institutions, on the one hand, and uncoordinated state action, on the other.”59
REMEDIES FOR PATHOLOGIES IN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS
The lesson of this chapter is that international organizations are both maddening and imperative. The goal for the United States is to tame these sometimes unwieldy creatures. It is to ensure that they can advance their global mandates, as well as narrower U.S. national interests, at acceptable costs to U.S. sovereign authority and freedom of action. In joining any formal body, the United States must decide what if any sovereign authority it is willing to transfer to the organization’s secretariat, or to pool within any collective intergovernmental board or council set up to direct and supervise the work of that body. Generally speaking, the most appropriate U.S. approach is a posture of tough love that balances constructive and sustained U.S. leadership with continuous vigilance and a commitment to reform. The option of leaving always remains, but it should remain a last resort.
With respect to the United Nations, specifically, it is imperative to recognize that there are multiple “UNs,” and that these unique institutional components merit different strategic approaches.60 Given the centrality of the UN Security Council for global peace and security, as well as the veto the United States enjoys as a permanent member, America should work vigorously through the Council whenever possible. With respect to the Secretariat, the United States should take the position of a friendly critic, supporting its work but insisting always on reform. America should engage UN specialized agencies and programs selectively, working closely with and channeling extra resources toward islands of excellence (such as UNHCR), while marginalizing those that are beyond salvage, have outlived their purpose, or have poor records of achievement, such as the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO). As for the UNGA and ECOSOC, the United States must continue its effort to break down encrusted and outdated regional and ideological blocs, while recognizing that America’s practical challenge will often be one of damage control.
In confronting international organizations generally, the United States has multiple mechanisms at its disposal to improve performance and reduce slack in bodies to which it has delegated authority, as well as to discipline those that go off track. It also has options to overcome some (albeit not all) of the downsides of pooling sovereignty.61
The best way to manage dilemmas of delegation is to keep organizations on a relatively short leash. This is admittedly easier to accomplish when an institution is first being designed rather than already operating. Potential steps include limiting the discretion granted to its senior officials and specifying in detail the rules that the organization (as the agent of its member states) must observe. As institutional performance varies, the United States can loosen or tighten the leash. To be sure, the effectiveness of this strategy will depend on how many other state principals share U.S. assessments of the agent’s performance, and indeed U.S. goals. For instance, authoritarian members of the Human Rights Council strenuously resist the appointment of rapporteurs to investigate human rights situations in specific countries, which takes place under the Council’s “special procedures.”
Second, the United States might also insist, in setting up an organization and mandating the functions of its subagencies, that the body and its activities be time-limited, or at least subject to periodic review and reauthorization by the board. Part of the success of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA), founded in 1943 to help meet the needs of those displaced by World War II and shuttered in 1947, can be attributed to its limited duration, which was planned from the outset.62 Too few international organizations today have “sunset provisions” that anticipate that their initiatives or indeed the multilateral body itself will cease after a given time frame.
Third, the United States can bolster accountability by insisting on regular, stringent reporting requirements.63 As with any bureaucracy, of course, a generic challenge remains: how to ensure that reports to member states and intergovernmental boards contain honest appraisals and meaningful information so that principals can accurately gauge how well the organization is fulfilling the terms of its contractual relationship. Lakhdar Brahimi, an experienced Algerian diplomat and UN troubleshooter, made this case in presenting his eponymously named report on UN peacekeeping in 2000: “The Secretariat must tell the Security Council what it needs to know, not what it wants to hear.”64 Beyond self-reporting by UN and other multilateral agencies, and direct monitoring by executive boards, the United States should also promote third-party monitoring, which can expose hidden information and action. Outside watchdog groups like Transparency International, as well as investigative journalists and global action networks like Principles for Responsible Investment, can complement U.S. and intergovernmental efforts to hold international organizations’ feet to the fire.65
Fourth, the governing boards of international organizations can increase the likelihood of consistency with their aims by requiring rigorous personnel screening and selection procedures for both senior leadership and staff. Alas, state shareholders are often AWOL in this effort, more intent on preserving country-specific slots and privileges than in appointing the most qualified agency heads or recruiting knowledgeable and competent civil servants. A glaring example is the U.S. and European insistence on maintaining their informal prerogative to choose the World Bank president and the IMF managing director, respectively. The uncontested reappointment of the American Jim Young Kim as president of the World Bank in 2016 mocked the executive board’s pledge of an “open and transparent” selection process, confirming suspicions that the United States is more interested in retaining its historical privileges than in submitting its candidate to real competition.66
The situation is only slightly better with respect to the selection of the UN secretary general. Although that choice ultimately remains in the hands of the Security Council, the 2016 nomination and selection process was markedly more open, consultative, and inclusive than the closed-door deliberations that had chosen António Gutteres’s eight predecessors. Unfortunately, at the staff level, UN management reform remains hamstrung by an outdated, barnacled, and sclerotic personnel system that prevents managers from hiring the best performers and firing those who underperform or are guilty of misconduct.67
Fifth, the United States and other nations can discourage opportunistic behavior within an international organization by inserting checks and balances within the body itself. These may include decentralization to avoid a concentration of power at the center, as well as the establishment of divisions with some competitive overlap. Once again, such engineering is more easily accomplished in the architectural design phase than through subsequent structural remodeling. Moreover, even well-intentioned efforts can create new problems. Overlapping mandates can create inefficient redundancies, while decentralization can hamper agile responses (as the WHO experience suggests).
In the end, the most important check on organizational slack may be insistence on an independent inspector general capable of auditing performance. Unfortunately, international organizations (and some member states) typically resist creating and giving real power to internal watchdogs. A case in point is the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) created under Ban Ki Moon’s tenure, which has too often failed to hold staff to account or to offer protection to whistle-blowers. Going forward, the United States must work with other like-minded member states and the secretary general to change deeply ingrained UN habits. Priorities must include strengthening the OIOS, mandating more flexible human resource policies, reforming the UN’s opaque procurement system, reviewing any UN mandates older than five years, and bolstering the UN ethics office, whistle-blower protections, and financial disclosure requirements. Success will require the United States to cultivate common approaches with moderate developing countries that have an inherent stake in a smoothly functioning United Nations. Dogged diplomacy, not righteous indignation, must rule the day.
It’s All about the Money
Financial leverage offers another, albeit problematic, avenue for the United States to signal its displeasure with international bodies that go off track. The United States has occasionally withheld (or threatened to withhold) contributions to the UN, as well as the World Bank and other entities, to press for reform. Where U.S. contributions are voluntary, this action may raise political but not legal hackles. The same cannot be said of assessed contributions, such as those that the United States owes for the UN’s regular and peacekeeping budgets. While opinion is not universal, most international lawyers consider it a violation of treaty obligations to withhold assessed contributions.68
Despite such qualms, during the 1990s the GOP-controlled Congress repeatedly withheld annual U.S. assessments to the UN in a unilateral effort to impose reform on and reduce U.S. support for the world body. In 1999, as discussed earlier, the Clinton administration negotiated a partial settlement of the arrears crisis. Consistent with the Helms-Biden agreement—a compromise between Senators Jesse Helms and Joseph Biden (D.-Del.), the chair and ranking member (respectively) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—the United States persuaded other member states to lower its contributions to the UN’s regular budget (from 25 to 22 percent) and the UN peacekeeping budget (from 30 to 26.5 percent), linked to benchmarks in UN performance.
The discount came at a price, however. The U.S. carrot-and-stick approach magnified the UN’s chronic budgetary woes, hobbled UN peacekeeping, distracted the attention of the U.S. mission to the UN from the global security agenda, alienated U.S. allies and potential partners in New York and member state capitals, and undercut America’s reputation for enlightened global leadership. The episode suggested the limits of trying to micromanage UN reform from the U.S. Congress.69 While there may be occasions when the U.S. separation of powers allows a U.S. administration to secure goals at the UN by playing “good cop” to Congress’s “bad cop,” the United States must beware of overplaying its hand.
More evidence that financial withholding is a blunt and counterproductive instrument came in 2011, when UNESCO members voted to admit the Palestinian Authority (PA). That step triggered a provision of the U.S. Code prohibiting U.S. funding of any UN organ that accorded Palestine member state status. The State Department immediately suspended its payment of annual assessments to the organization (22 percent of the agency’s budget). In so doing, the United States violated its treaty obligations and lost its seat on the UNESCO governing body. Obama administration officials suddenly faced the real prospect that the PA might dramatically complicate matters for Washington by trying to join up to twenty other UN agencies, forcing the United States to suspend payments to the WHO, World Intellectual Property Organization, IMF, and IAEA, among other bodies. Legislative constraints, in other words, could force the United States to cut off its nose to spite its face.70 Fortunately for the the United States, the PA ultimately agreed not to go down this route—for now.
Given these lessons, it was worrisome when the Trump administration in early 2017 suggested that the United States might unilaterally abandon any formal legal obligation to support the UN’s regular and peacekeeping budgets and henceforth treat all U.S. contributions to the United Nations as voluntary. This has long been a dream of UN skeptics, including Representative Ros-Lehtinen who, as chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced a bill in 2015 that would do just that, as well as John Bolton, who recommended a similar step shortly after Trump’s election.71
In his first week in office, President Trump commissioned the drafting of an executive order, “Auditing and Reducing U.S. Funding of International Organizations.” Beyond envisioning a 40 percent cut in annual U.S. voluntary contributions to UN agencies and programs, it endorsed transforming U.S. assessed contributions to the UN and other international organizations into purely voluntary rather than legally binding commitments. Such a strategy would be irresponsible and shortsighted. Beyond wreaking havoc on the UN budget, this rash move would undermine U.S. diplomatic influence at the UN, reducing Washington’s ability to shape the UN agenda. It would also set a terrible precedent, since other countries would surely follow suit, cherry-picking among their own preferred UN activities. Finally, such a unilateral step would violate America’s solemn legal obligations under the UN Charter.72
If All Else Fails
Short of cutting off finances, the United States has two final options for reining in organizations that have gone rogue. The first is to object persistently to acts and decisions that U.S. officials believe violate the mandate and objectives of the body in question. Signaling displeasure can have legal significance, since it repudiates any notion that the United States has “consented” to new, objectionable norms or rules being promoted by the organization (and thus accepts them as “custom”). While adopting such a “persistent objector” stance would not “necessarily prevent the formation of a norm of customary international law,” it would exempt the United States from being bound by the practice.73
In the end, there remains the ultimate option: renouncing U.S. membership in an organization that U.S. officials believe has abused or exceeded the authorities delegated to it. As the political theorist Albert Hirschman pointed out in his 1970 treatise Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, there are essentially two choices available to any dissatisfied member of an organization—expressing one’s displeasure or departing. When the United States has made its feelings known but has seen no change of behavior, it may choose to leave, either by suspending or (more provocatively) by terminating its membership. This is an extreme step. Nevertheless, the founding treaties of many international organizations explicitly grant states parties the right to withdraw unilaterally.74 And the United States has occasionally done so, including from UNESCO in the 1980s, in response to that organization’s anti-Western bias.
To be meaningful from the perspective of sovereignty, of course, the option of “exit” must be plausible. A state may have the notional authority to leave an international arrangement, but true sovereignty depends on its ability to credibly do so (or threaten to do so). Many American conservatives worry that when push comes to shove the United States will be so enmeshed in international bodies, such as the UN or the WTO, that the cost of exit is too onerous to constitute a real choice. Such concerns were often heard in the debate over Brexit, with some British advocates of “Remain” arguing that the costs of breaking with the EU were so exorbitant that even those leading the “Leave” campaign would inevitably be forced to lead their constituents on the path back to Europe.75
Leaving an international organization is not a step to be undertaken lightly. Beyond the international stigma that may attach to it, withdrawal would deprive the United States of the opportunity to shape the norms, objectives, and activities of the relevant body. It would shift the sovereignty bargain to increase autonomy at the expense of influence, in the face of challenges that do not respect borders. Still, it could in some rare circumstances be necessary.
What is dangerous, however, is any notion that the United States can as a blanket matter back away from multilateral institutions like the United Nations without damaging its own interests. The UN Human Rights Council is a case in point. Critics of that body correctly note that it is a flawed institution whose members include human rights violators. But, as defenders of U.S. membership point out, a U.S. departure would only create a vacuum of influence that would be filled by problematic actors like China and Pakistan, who would seek to curtail debate on human rights issues. The experience of the Obama administration suggests that the United States has more to gain by remaining and bringing U.S. diplomatic influence to bear within the Human Rights Council, so that it can restrain that body’s worst excesses and—more positively—shine a spotlight on the world’s worst abusers.76
More generally, there is a powerful strategic rationale for the United States to reinforce long-standing international institutions, rather than seek to dismantle them entirely. As a globally dominant power facing relative (though not absolute) decline, at least in its share of the world economy, the United States has a natural incentive to try to preserve the norms, rules, and standards in existing institutions that it has helped to establish since 1945, rather than back away from them. In this regard, the Trump administration’s initial instinct to dismantle and renegotiate existing international arrangements was deeply problematic, since there was little guarantee that any new arrangements would be as favorable to U.S. interests and preferences as those frameworks that had been negotiated at the height of U.S. power.
THE FANTASY OF WORLD GOVERNMENT
In their search for more effective and accountable international organizations, the one direction in which Americans should not look is toward the ultimate goal of world government. There is admittedly little public appetite for such an objective. American nationalism is vigorous, as is popular support for U.S. sovereignty. Still, the prospect of a world state is one that generates attention at both extremes of the U.S. political spectrum—and as such it deserves scrutiny.
On the hard right, conservative nationalists regularly warn that U.S. concessions to or compromises within an international organization are misguided steps on the slippery slope toward global government.77 On the utopian left, world federalists offer the gauzy vision of a pacific and just world that has moved “beyond sovereignty.” In fact, both views are incorrect: world government is nowhere on the horizon.
Although arguments for world government come in many guises, its advocates typically envision a shift in global authority whereby the members of the (so-called) United Nations become truly “united” within a single polity, in the form of a planetary state. This argument—that a world state is imperative, that it is desirable, and that it is inevitable—is not new. It has been a staple of Western political thought for centuries, visible in the writings of William Penn, among others.78
Advocates of world government plead their case on grounds of necessity, functionality, morality, and legitimacy. Some argue that the sheer brutishness of world politics, and the inability of independent sovereign units to control destructive technologies or respect ecological boundaries, compels the creation of a supranational authority. Functionalists, meanwhile, predict that economic integration will create a “world polity,” and that individual nation-states will coalesce into ever larger political units, ultimately culminating in a world state. Ethicists argue that only a universal state can deliver true global justice. Finally, advocates of cosmopolitan democracy argue that the legitimacy of global bodies depends on whether they give direct political voice to individuals, proposing various processes of “global constitutionalism” to move beyond the nation-state.79
Today, talk of “world government” is a fringe preoccupation, to which few scholars and even fewer policymakers give serious consideration. Such discussions occur at the margins of U.S. political discourse, among members of the visionary left and in some corners of academia.80 This was not always the case. As UN expert Thomas G. Weiss notes, the possibility of world government was a common, serious topic of debate in the United States during the 1940s. On March 5, 1942, the Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace—chaired by John Foster Dulles no less—endorsed the formation of a nascent world government possessing a world parliament, an international court, and international agencies with the power to regulate trade, settle disputes, and control military power.81
By the end of World War II, a surprising number of American intellectuals, politicians, and ordinary citizens envisioned a postsovereign world. Some were motivated by the immense destructive power unleashed by the atomic bomb. In October 1945 Albert Einstein signed a letter in the New York Times predicting that the new United Nations would fail because it was based on “the absolute sovereignty of rival nation-states.” What was needed, he wrote, was a “Federal Constitution of the world, a working worldwide legal order, if we hope to prevent atomic war.”82
The early postwar years were the heyday of the United World Federalists, founded in 1947. And they were not alone. As Weiss writes, “Throughout the 1940s, it was impossible in the United States to read periodicals, listen to the radio, or watch newsreels and not encounter the idea of world government.” In the late 1940s, thirty of the (then) forty-eight U.S. state legislatures passed resolutions supporting “a U.S. response to growing interdependence and instability that would pool American sovereignty with that of other countries.”83
Testifying before the House of Representatives in 1948, Dulles asserted, “Our great Nation is ready to take the lead in surrendering its sovereignty to the extent necessary to establish peace through the ordering of just law.” The following year, 111 members of the House of Representatives supported Concurrent Resolution 64, declaring that it should be “a fundamental objective of the foreign policy of the United States to support and strengthen the United Nations and to see its development into a world federation.” Even Hans Morgenthau, a prominent Cold War realist, would write, “There can be no permanent international peace without a state coextensive with the confines of the political world. The question to which we must now direct our attention concerns the manner in which a world state can be created.”84
By the early 1950s, though, such one-worldism was in retreat, overwhelmed by anticommunist obsessions, the rise of McCarthyism, anticolonial struggles, and the requirements of containment. Today, despite globalization, discussion of world government has vanished from the U.S. public sphere. And its objective seems as distant and unreal as the fictional “noplace” described by Sir Thomas More in his 1516 work Utopia.
And we are fortunate this is the case, because a global state is a terrible idea. The case for it rests on three dubious propositions: that world government is needed, that it is desirable, and that it is achievable. To begin with, a world state is unnecessary. Sovereign states are often seen as obstacles to managing global problems and, indeed, as generating such problems. And yet the international system is capable of at least incremental change, and of muddling through.85 Though deeply imperfect, existing frameworks of multilateral cooperation have enjoyed some limited success in addressing pressing global problems, including global poverty, nuclear proliferation, and global financial instability. If there is an area in which the sovereign state system has not delivered, it is in the ecological realm, particularly in dealing with climate change. Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that a world state would manage these problems any better.
Second, a world state is undesirable because it is likely to produce bad outcomes. Advocates of world government regard sovereignty as the ultimate source of war, inasmuch as independent states that recognize no supreme global authority are inherently competitive, insecure, and prone to violence. Where they go astray is in presuming that a global Leviathan would be an inherently peaceful, even benevolent, world empire, rather than a despotic one. This is an astonishing leap of faith, given the violent internal history of many large states, as well as the human tendency to transform concentrated power into tyranny.
In fact, one can make a powerful ethical argument that the sovereign state is the best possible approach to world order on a planet of diverse political communities. If all the world’s many peoples conceived of themselves as sharing a common identity, the case for a single global political unit would be strong. Without such solidarity, a supranational authority would inevitably run roughshod over distinctive national aspirations. For this reason even Immanuel Kant based his vision of perpetual peace not on a single world state but on a confederation of independent liberal republics. Modern political theorists like Michael Walzer have expanded on this theme, arguing that sovereign states are morally privileged entities, since the obligations that individuals owe to fellow citizens outweigh their real but lesser obligations to humanity at large. This argument is especially persuasive in democracies, which have a legitimate claim to represent the popular will of their citizens.86
Third, even if a world state were necessary and desirable, it remains an implausible political project even over the medium term—say, within the next century. And the main reason is that national governments remain deeply attached to sovereignty. To be sure, “world government” could take various forms, including a fairly loose arrangement analogous to the U.S. Articles of Confederation, which (as chapter 2 explained) left many powers in the hands of the thirteen former colonies. But such a framework would still imply a common, superior political authority, a prospect few nations are prepared to contemplate. Notwithstanding the proliferation of international, regional, and subregional organizations, as well as new doctrines of “contingent” sovereignty, the dominant global trend is for states to reassert rather than subordinate or pool sovereign privileges. This is a trend that unites many of the world’s leading powers, both established (such as the United States, Britain, Japan, Russia) and emerging (China, India, Brazil, South Africa) alike. This attachment to sovereignty also helps account for the rise of flexible forms of multilateral cooperation (such as ad hoc coalitions) rather than more formal international organizations and binding treaty regimes.
There is nothing eternal about the sovereign state, of course. It is a historical artifact and as such will presumably be replaced someday. Still, its disappearance would be a world-historical transformation, akin to the transition from the medieval to the modern world associated with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. In its most complete manifestation, a postsovereign world would imply the state’s loss of exclusive and supreme political authority (and monopoly on legitimate use of armed force) within its territory, its surrender of policy autonomy, its cessation of control over cross-border flows, and its loss of juridical independence to a global supranational organization.
It is difficult to conceive how such a wholesale shift—which would involve the creation not just of a universal system of collective security but a single supranational authority above all component units—could occur without an apocalyptic crisis confronting humanity. The interests of the great powers, the forces of nationalism, and political tendencies toward fragmentation are simply too great.
On the other hand, the rise of existential threats does suggest that the preservation of democratic sovereignty will depend on more intensive forms of international cooperation. The U.S. domestic reaction to 9/11 demonstrated that traditional constitutional liberties can be overwhelmed by an acute sense of vulnerability, as society demands security. The world today has enough plutonium to make 400,000 weapons of the type used to destroy Hiroshima. In the aftermath of even one use in an American city, the United States would surely risk becoming a garrison state. (Global climate change presents a similar, if more gradual, threat of a Hobbesian world.)
Greater multilateral cooperation is frequently depicted as a slippery step toward a global federal union. But rather than “stepping stones,” Daniel Deudney suggests, international bodies and agreements might better be viewed as capstones or a ceiling.87 Indeed, the UN Charter implicitly rejects the notion of a world state, in focusing on the sovereignty of nation-states. To avoid either the hardening of the nation-state, at the expense of democracy and liberty, or the temptation of a supranational world state, the answer is for greater multilateral cooperation among sovereign state units.